Castelgerundo

Castelgerundo is one of the youngest comuni in Italy: it has existed since 1 January 2018, when Camairago and Cavacurta merged into a single municipality — a merger that had already been tried in Napoleon's day and that this time went through by referendum, on 22 October 2017. The new name, though, is the oldest thing about the place: it recalls the lake Gerundo, the great sheet of standing water that is supposed to have covered the plain between the Adda and the Serio. Two years after its birth, in February 2020, the comune found itself among the ten in the Lodi area that made up the first confirmed cluster of the pandemic in Italy.

Of the Mare Gerundo only one document is known, of 28 September 1204: the donation of a plot at Lodi Nuovo which bordered, one reads, on the coast and bank of the Mare Gerundo. The rest is legend, and concerns the dragon Tarantasio, who from the shores made slaughter of men and above all of children and fouled the air with his breath — the stench was real enough, and it was hydrogen sulphide and methane rising from the muddy bottom. The monster is said to have been killed and the lake drained by a nameless hero who turns out to be the founder of the Visconti: hence the serpent devouring a man. The real draining was done by the monks of nearby abbeys and by the strengthening of the Muzza canal; as for the name, it probably comes from géra, gravel, because the area was stony rather than marshy.